An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.

This little clip combines some of the most-hated elements: Oom-pah music, child singers and holiday references. I've been humming it ever since I saw this festive message on the window of Mitchell's Original earlier this month.

Where was the libertarian right during the great struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians. ....Civil libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the subordination of politics to religion -- issues like the campaign to expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall Street brokerage firms....Michael Lind in Why libertarians apologize for autocracy -- The experience of every modern democratic nation-state proves that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy (Salon)

The beauty of a brief affair is its ability to exist as a single, unique memory. No money discussions or arguments about housecleaning. No family tension, or scheduling, or indignities of sharing a bathroom. There is no slow recognition of incompatibility, gnashing of personalities, or fade into dissolution. The one-night stand is the perfect moment -- a self-contained little pocket of intense emotion, as lovely and fleeting as lilac season.

I didn't have very many micro-flings in my single days, but my memory is that the purported perfection was usually thrown off by one of us -- me, more often than not -- taking things a bit too seriously; not allowing the fleeting to flee, as it were.

Humphrey's article suggests that social media has made these just-ships-passing-in-the-night romances either all but impossible or at least prone to complications.

The kids were all set for a big, end-of-summer outing to Six Flags Great America in Gurnee today when my son's girlfriend had the presence of mind to check the calendar at the park's website (left) and saw that, as of Monday, the park is now closed on weekdays.

Before Labor Day???

Such a preposterous idea that I hadn't even bothered to check. I guess one of their famous six flags is a white flag, surrendering early on summer. Fie.

Since posting this on Facebook I've heard from several families whom I've saved from a similar fate this week.

The Daily Herald will become the first newspaper in the Chicago area to charge regularly for digital access, the company announced today in letters to its readers....

The new policy will take effect Sept. 7. Non-subscribers will be allowed a small number of free page views of content each 30-day period to sample dailyherald.com before access to the site is restricted. This policy will apply to most content, the company said, but some features will be categorized as premium content and restricted altogether.

Print subscribers to the ArlingtonHeights-based daily will get the digital offerings for $1 extra a week. Non-subscribers will have to pay $19.95 a month.

I like the Herald. Many fine journalists work there or have worked there. And I really want this model for sustaining quality online journalism to work.

Here's what pols do: When they don't like a budget cutting idea, they argue that it will hardly make a dent considering the size of the problem, as if a single idea isn't valid if it doesn't solve the budget in one move. But when they do like a budget cutting idea, especially one with great PR value, they talk up how every little bit helps and this is an example of the measures they're taking....Steve Rhodes

Yes, and the truth is there is great symbolic value in some of these nugatory notions -- I thought it was great when Pat Quinn scratched "lieutenant" off his business cards when he made the transition from Lt. Gov. to Gov., and I praised Treasurer Dan Rutherford for figuring out ways to reuse some of former Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias' stationery.

Such moves set the proper tone, send the proper message up and down the line that we're going to be tight with the public's dollar

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

I am the mother of a high school senior and a college sophomore, two great kids, very different but successful in his or her own way. Here is my advice for high school parents.

1. Drive carpool.

There is no better way on earth to get intelligence about your children. Drive them to games, to and from practice, pick them up from school when possible. If the car is filled with friends, resist the urge to join the conversation. Your kids will forget you are there and you will hear things you would never have heard otherwise. Driving home from an event is best, the kids will be bubbling over with stories.

Have you ever comparison shopped for coffee in the grocery and come across, for example, neighboring brands, one on sale for $8.25 a pound, according to the unit pricing label, and the other marked at 53 cents an ounce? And did you then slump at the prospect of doing the conversion — multiplying 53 by 16 in your head — and just grab one?

If so, you'll have a small idea of the mathematical challenges facing anyone who tries to sort out the claims and counterclaims in the debate heating up over the length of the school day in Chicago.

Example: Officials with the Chicago Public Schools, who are pushing for a longer day, have produced a fact sheet that says Chicago public elementary school students get 52,360 minutes per year in average instructional time, less than students in New York City (60,060 minutes per year).

Officials with the Chicago Teachers Union countered with their own fact sheet: Public elementary school students in Chicago get 921 instructional hours per year, more than students in New York City (910 hours).

The comparison is important. If Chicago is lagging badly behind other major urban centers, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel's education team is contending, then the Chicago Teachers Union will take a pounding in the looming public relations battle over Emanuel's determination to add 90 minutes to the school day.

The disqualification of Usain Bolt (center) in the 100 meter final Sunday at the World Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Daegu, South Korea, has prompted a call to rescind the one-false-start-and-you're-out rule, and prompts me to ask, what rules in sports do you think need changing?

No need to mention the ol' reliable argument starter, the designated hitter. We can stipulate that many find it an abomination, many find it a blessing and many don't care in the least. But other rules that should be done away with or altered?

Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.It's a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools.

And, of course, a scenario that public-school critics have long yearned for.

Under a law signed in May by Gov. Mitch Daniels, more than 3,200 Indiana students are receiving vouchers to attend private schools. ...Until Indiana started its program, most voucher systems were limited to poor students, those in failing schools or those with special needs. But Indiana's is significantly larger, offering money to students from middle-class homes and solid school districts. Nearly 70 percent of the vouchers approved statewide are for students opting to attend Catholic schools...

The South Bend district expects to lose $1.3 million in funding if all the students who have signed up for vouchers leave.

But I'm sure the competition will inspire them to improve, despite the loss of funds.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Dueholm makes the point that I make in recommending Savage Love as a weekly download -- as candid and occasionally astonishing as the subject matter can be, it is relentlessly, refreshingly, consistently ethical.

Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership.....When Obama took office, the economy was losing about 750,000 jobs a month and heading for another Great Depression. The recession ended (at least for a while) and we now are adding several thousand jobs a month -- anemic growth, but an awful lot better than the alternative. How did that happen? Luck?...The Republican alternative for job creation wasn’t tax cuts (the stimulus contained almost $300 billion in tax cuts) but deficit reduction and rolling back regulation. I’ve yet to see a single economist convincingly argue how either would have reversed the catastrophic job losses.

Notes from a visit over the weekend to Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers:

1. Even the drunkest Brewer fans we encountered didn't seem to have their hearts in hating the hapless Cubs. They put the good-natured into "good-natured razzing." Which was a little insulting, actually. They simply don't take the Cubs particularly seriously as rivals these days.

2. Every time I go to a modern yet slightly retro ballpark like Miller, my affection Wrigley Field diminishes a bit more more. Wide corridors. Great sightlines. An informative scoreboard with high-def replays. Easy and inexpensive ($8) parking. Wrigley has its quirks and charms, but it's a dump in so many ways.

3. I was impressed and intrigued by the football-game like tailgate culture that seems to have arisen around Brewer games. We allowed for too much travel time, arrived 90 minutes early and the parking-lot festivities had clearly been going on already for many hours. I've never driven to a Sox game ... are there a lot of wing-dings in the lots there?

4. For all that they spent on the ballpark, the builders skimped on the signage. On the highway. Around the parking lots. In the parking lots. On the way into the stadium. Inside the stadium. Those who designed the entire complex failed, in the end, to view it again through the eyes of first-time visitors.

5. Unrelated to this ballpark, but the question came to me again: If you've been chosen to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, don't you get out and practice? Don't you, if you have a weak arm, figure out which distance short of 60 feet 6 inches from the pitching rubber to the plate will best allow you not to short-hop the throw?

Maybe it's a version of the inflated self-confidence that prevents the occasional National Anthem singer from taking a few minutes to go over the lyrics in advance (it's broad stripes and bright stars, not the other way around; a perilous fight, not a perilous night.)

The kids who threw out first pitches Saturday night in Milwaukee did better than the hapless adults (what's the record, do you suppose, for number of ceremonial first pitches at a given game?).

I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending....Michele Bachmann, quoted in the St. Petersburg Times.

UPDATE: Bachmann's spokeswoman says it was a joke, but honestly, really? So many opportunistic believers have so often pointed to natural occurrences as expressions of divine sentiment (below) that the question, after "really?" becomes, a joke a whose expense?

Reminds me of my all-purpose gaffe excuse, "I was just being satirical," which is right up there with my all-pupose excuse for orthographical blunders, "Oh, that's the Teutonic spelling of the word."

Looking gaunt and frail, this is Steve Jobs seen for the first time since his surprise departure from Apple last week. This picture, taken outside the technology mogul’s California home, fuelled fears that Jobs was nearing the end in his eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer....Daily Mail, via today's WGN AM Morning Memo

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Starting at the 52:28 minute mark in the current "Radiolab," New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell explains why he roots for the favorite, not the underdog:

"I'm distressed by the injustice of the person who should win not winning...it is the only humane position....I have a deep distrust and unhappiness with luck.So I do not like it when the outcome turns on an unrepeatable sequence...When expectations and rules are violated, some part of me takes offense."

I highly recommend that you subscribe to this podcast, even though, in this episode, they mixed up the Michigan and Michigan State fight songs, usually a deal-breaker for me.

A roundup of state and local news-review and weekly political chat shows. Descriptions provided by the broadcast outlets in most cases:

Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review (WTTW-Ch 11) Host Joel Weisman with Mike Flannery, Fox News Chicago; Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune; Eddie Arruza, WTTW-Channel 11; Peggy Kusinski, NBC-5 Chicago: Chicagoans are hit with both a whopping 87 percent toll hike and a $150 million property tax increase for the Chicago Public Schools. Meanwhile, the RTA and the City are suing two Illinois towns over lost sales tax revenue. The Chicago Teachers Union rejects a 2 percent raise for longer school days. So now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is appealing to preachers to sermonize Sunday for more time in the classroom. Mike Madigan riles fellow Democrats by attending a fundraiser for Republican Speaker John Boehner. And in sports, the Bears battle the Titans after the New York Giants thumping on Monday Night Football. And the White Sox slip further back in the Central Division, while the Ricketts’ oust longtime Cubs General Manager Jim Hendry.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.